Tag: industry news

In the current academic publishing environment, a number of scholarly social networks happen to be in the news mainly for copyright infringement allegations. Such academic social networks are a common place for researchers and authors to connect with others in the community and share their published papers online. However, these networking platforms do not have…read more

Reproducibility has been a standard of good scientific research for many decades. The reason for striving to design a study that can be repeated and produce the same results is quite simple. Other researchers must be able to recreate the results you have observed if these results are to be considered science. The Reproducibility Crisis…read more

Discovering and tracking the latest research can be overwhelming tasks, even for senior researchers. With the increasing number of articles that get published each year, keeping oneself well versed with the newest developments in the field is becoming more and more time-consuming. Thankfully, advances in machine learning and natural language processing has helped to simplify this process. Sparrho is one such platform with a mission to help researchers stay on top of the latest publications across all fields of science via dynamic feeds and expert-curated pinboards.

John McCarthy first coined the term “artificial intelligence” (AI) in 1956 at a conference in Dartmouth. AI means that machines can mirror the functions of the human brain in various applications such as problem-solving in Mathematics. Since then, interest in AI has grown exponentially over the years. Recently, Apple published an AI paper of its…read more

In early October, two scientists shared a software program that detects incorrect gene sequences in already published research experiments. Using the program, the duo identified experimental flaws in more than 60 papers within cancer research alone. Scientists Jennifer Byrne and Cyril Labbé combined their expertise in cancer-research and computer-science, to introduce the software “Seek &…read more

About 15 years ago, a social media network called “Friendster” launched. It was a forum where people of similar interests could communicate and share ideas. Since then, networking sites have blossomed. In 2003, “LinkedIn” launched and now it has nearly 300 million members. During that same period, other social media sites, such as “Facebook” and “Twitter,”…read more

ScholarlyHub is the brainchild of Guy Geltner, a professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam. Along with other collaborators, he developed ScholarlyHub as a non-profit scholarly network and publishing platform. The aim of the website is to allow academics to publish, share, and access work without any financial constraints. This site also offers…read more

Following a recent ruling by a district court in Virginia in favor of the American Chemical Society (ACS), several domains of the controversial pirate website, Sci-Hub, have become inactive. In addition to slapping $4.8 million in damages, the ruling also stated that internet search engines and web-hosting services should refrain from providing access to such…read more

The Metadata 2020 program will advocate for richer metadata. Metadata is simply digital data that describes other data. This ambitious program is organized by CrossRef and advised by ORCID. Metadata 2020 involves various academic stakeholders: namely universities, publishers, funders, library associations, and any other groups that care about scholarly communication. Importantly, the Metadata 2020 program…read more

Scientists receive payments for their experiments through research grants. Research funding is critical to what scientists are able to do. This means that research funders have a lot of power. Without meaning to, they can influence what questions research institutions try to answer. After all, they can only work on what they have been given…read more

The fight for open access is almost 15 years old now. Has it made real gains? Open access (OA) remains controversial and obviously threatens commercial journal publishers that profit from expensive paywalls and subscriptions. A new large-scale study by Piwowar et al. investigates the prevalence and features of OA usage, namely of green OA, gold…read more

In the second part of this interview series, Anita shares with us the importance of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) and how they can improve the value of a research paper. She also discusses the importance of reproducibility in academic research and highlights how journals, publishers, and funding agencies are requiring strict adherence to reproducibility guidelines. In addition, Anita…read more

Data management has become an increasingly discussed topic among the academic community. Managing data is an element of open science, which has proven to increase dissemination of research and citations for journal articles. Open science increases public access to academic articles, mostly through preprint repositories. Indeed, according to this study, open access (OA) articles are…read more

With the advent of the internet and emergence of digital archiving, access to information has significantly increased. A major milestone in making information publicly and freely available was the Human Genome Project. In early 2000, important events such as Budapest OA Initiative and Berlin Declaration acted as enablers to the OA movement. However, the growth…read more

ResearchGate is a platform that allows researchers to upload and share their work with others in the community. Termed as an academic social network, ResearchGate is currently embroiled in a battle against publishers, with the latter crying copyright infringement. Due to pressure from a coalition of publishers, including Elsevier and Wiley, ResearchGate is set to…read more